Mario

Chronastromy tends to give its practitioners a young-yet-ageless look, and Mario certainly has it–he’s a forty-year vet who now resembles himself at twenty. So it’s incongruous, the old man’s desperate fear in his eyes.

“Gaia damn those fools,” he swears to himself, shimmering into the middle of a Pasadena mall. “Eighteen ninety-two. I said eighteen ninety-two, and they’re off by a century!”

He’s been spotted by then; the teens have begun converging from all angles. “Slater!” they are shrieking. “Slater!” It’s not his name.

The jet boots get him through a skylight, but he knows he’s not safe for long.

A story about Mario, published on Monday, September 6, 2004, at 1:26 pm.